GirlTECH   Cynthia Lanius talks about GirlTECH, an NSF funded program addressing women's underrepresentation in computer science and her own experiences learning to use technology.   By Melissa Burgos Brown SCR*TEC   Now to me, the starkest piece of data, is that, of all of the AP exams given in '97, girls made up only 17 percent of the students who took the AP computer science test. It's the lowest of any AP test given. AP calculus is in the 40s . . . Calculus is up in the 40 percents, chemistry is in the 40s, biology is above 50, and then, compare that to 17 percent of the students who take the computer science tests are females. This is a dramatic example of how girls are not using computers in the same way that boys do. --Cynthia Lanius

ynthia Lanius is a Master Teacher, Manager of K-12 Education for the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), and Director of GirlTECH. Cynthia is involved in making teachers aware of the underrepresentation of women in computer science and training teachers to use the Internet effectively in their classrooms. She speaks at many conferences on publishing curriculum on the Web and has published numerous math and science Web-based lesson plans and instructional materials.

"One of the reasons that I got interested in how girls use technologies especially was, I remember going to a workshop for teachers and I was very embarassed that I didn't know how to fit the diskette into the little slot. I tried to watch other people to see how they were doing it so that I wouldn't embarass myself. And so I realized how daunting, trying to use new technologies can be in a public place."

You were a high school math teacher for eight years, how did you get interested in educational technology?   Well, my skills were very weak in technology. I was a mathematics teacher. I was attending workshops seeing applications of technologies in teaching that I wasn't able to do myself. I was really anxious to learn these technologies, because I felt like they were very effective in the classroom.   So how did you go about learning to use these technologies?   Well, I would say that I taught myself partly. I sat down at a machine with a manual. One of the reasons that I got interested in how girls use technologies especially was, I remember going to a workshop for teachers and I was very embarassed that I didn't know how to fit the diskette into the little slot. I tried to watch other people to see how they were doing it so that I wouldn't embarass myself. And so I realized how daunting, trying to use new technologies can be in a public place. Maybe they shouldn't be, but because it's this machine, you know, you can't ask it a question and have it respond to you. It seems to be cold and unyielding in a certain way. So I partly taught myself. My students taught me at school. I'm very open to learning from students and they've taught me a lot of things. I went to workshops. When I started GirlTECH, I wasn't selected to run GirlTECH because of my expertise in technology, but I had been very involved in mathematics teacher training, in developing and helping to run workshops in mathematics for teachers. So that's what I knew about, I knew what made for a good workshop for teachers. And then I brought the technology side in by bringing in master teachers that had the technology skills. We learned from them. I actually went through the program that I was actually managing.

Let's talk a little bit about your classroom experience, how did you go about becoming a leader at your school, with regards to technology?   I think one thing that happened was that the timing was right, because it [GirlTECH] started in '95, and so, that was just when the Web was starting, in education circles anyway, to explode. Everyone was hearing about this technology that was so fun and exciting. You know, "What's all of this WWW stuff about?" That's what everyone wanted to know about. Our training was Web-based and so the timing was just perfect. The teachers really wanted to learn about it. I had also been involved already, as I mentioned earlier, in this mathematics teacher training. I'd previously written a proposal to Texaco, that Texaco had funded, for mathematics teachers to have training from our school. So they were used to working with me on those kinds of projects.

I was looking through some of your Web pages and I was very surprised to find that you learned to do HTML just a year or two ago, I also really enjoyed your site on how to publish 4-star Web pages, you had some interesting evaluation tools and advice, how did your Web page production expand into such an extensive set of resources?   Okay, let me tell you the story. We started GirlTECH in '95 and at that time I didn't know how to write one word of HTML. In fact, I barely knew what it was. I had seen a few Web pages, but not many. So the first year that we ran GirlTECH in '95, I was really so busy with this new program, I didn't get to learn too much. So it was really in '96 when I was giving this training session to mathematics teachers on fractal geometry, that I thought, 'Well I wonder what I could find on the Web that would help me with this presentation?' So I started looking, and I couldn't find anything that was really written for children. The fractals that were on the Web were either very high level mathematics or just pretty pictures. So I was frustrated by that. I thought, you know kids can really get into this, if it's written in language that they can understand. I really believed that it could be written in that language. So I decided I was going to try it. I was going to put one hour's presentation on the Web.

I did this one little lesson on the sierpinski triangle, "How to make the sierpinski triangle." And then I had links, "Fractals on the Web," etc. So that was what my whole site was going to consist of. I probably had a personal homepage by then, but I didn't write it, somebody helped me with it. But you know, somebody had shown me by then, how to view the document source and I felt like I could stumble along to do one page. That's all that I had for a while, but it was very well received. People really liked it and used it. I had this vision when I did this, that there would be these kids at home playing on the Web and they would come across this math that was really fun and neat. Fractal geometry is really neat. They would stumble on this somehow and they would go "Oh, this is good!" And that's sort of what happened. I've gotten mail from all parts of the world about this mathematics that I've published.         I have to say I'm very self taught on this. I learned how to do this by viewing the document source. I'd see something somebody had done and say, 'Oh, that's neat, how did they do that?' Then I would try to learn from their pages. I think what I prove is how accessible this technology is to everyone, because I feel like, if I can do it, anyone can do it. I really do. It's very simple and I love training teachers how to do it and that's what we do in our summer program, is we train other teachers how to publish this curriculum on the Web. .

GirlTECH/MCSA Workshop participants share ideas on how to encourage minorities and women to pursue mathematics and science careers. From left to right, Lucille Barrera, Bahiyyah El-Amin, workshop co-director Cynthia Lanius, and Isaiah Bromon. The workshop was co-sponsored by the Center for Research on Parallel Computation and the RGK Foundation of Austin, Texas.

You have also authored several online Math lesson plans, most recently one on Geometry called School-Bus Geometry, when did you start creating online lesson plans?   Well, after I did the fractal unit, the next unit that I did was the mathematics of cartography. Four years ago, I got a fellowship for an independent study one summer to study some topic of how social science and mathematics are interrelated. I had always loved maps so that's what I picked and I won this fellowship. So after I did the study, I was supposed to write a curriculum unit on my study. I tried and it just never happened. I would sit down to write and create what I wanted to create and it just didn't happen. Well last year sometime, I was asked to present on that subject to some teachers at a teacher workshop on maps and math, so I thought, 'Oh, this is neat, I'll do my one hour workshop and publish it on the Web. I felt really good about it because I had always felt like that [project] was really unfinished. So I started out again to do a one hour workshop and it turned out to be about 10 pages on this unit on mathematics of cartography. So that was the second major unit, and that one little lesson on fractal geometry turned into about 30 pages. Just one idea gives you another idea and another idea.         Now, I'm very limited in what I can do. I mean, I don't know java. I can't do any of that, but I have one unit called "No matter what shape you fractions are in" and it uses pattern blocks to teach fractions in a conceptual way rather than just an algorithmic way of 'To add fractions do this, step two do this . . .' What I wanted to teach was an understanding of it rather than a step-by-step process. I published this unit on the Web. I'm a high school teacher and most of this stuff is for younger [students] but everybody likes it, I mean I have adults tell me they really like it too. When I said it's for children, I try to make myself be true to the mission, write it in language that children can understand. If I write it in language that children can understand, then everyone can. When I say I write it in language that children can understand, I don't mean that it's simplistic. I still hope that it's creative and fun. Anyway, I don't have the skills to write java, but after I had published this unit, I got an e-mail from a computer scientist in California that said that he wanted to write java applets to be used for educational purposes and would it be okay with me if he were to write a java applet to go along with this Pattern Blocks [lesson about how shapes are multiples of each other]. So now we have this online java applet that they [browsers] can actually do this online.        And from that, this other family created an activity called Pattern Pals. It's like pen pals only it's this whole site where they do these gorgeous designs online with these pattern blocks. They have the children create designs electronically and then e-mail them. They host them on their site and they call it the Pattern Pals site. So now we have the teacher that's inspiring the parents to create this thing, and then also having the computer scientist bring in the technology side. So you have the curriculum side from the teacher and the technology side from the computer scientist, and you have the parent side bringing in the home support.

You're working on several projects that I would like to talk about. First, can you tell me a little bit about the Center for Research on Parallel Computation, your role as manager, and how you got involved with this organization?   I am the manager of outreach programs. CRPC is a National Science Foundation funded science and technology center. It's a very high-level research institution researching parallel computation. They have an interest in doing outreach to the rest of the educational world. In other words, they want to reach the world with some parallel computing but they also have an interest in helping the educational community, not just with parallel computing, but in all aspects of the computational sciences.         Now, here's how I became involved. Probably in '91, I participated in an outreach program that they had called "The Mathematics and Computational Sciences Awareness Workshop" and after I became involved in that program, I started working for them sort of on an informal basis. I wanted to get more of the teachers at my school involved. I taught at Milby High School, the largest high school in Houston and when I would go to these programs, it was really important for me to try to encourage other teachers at my school to also participate. So I started working informally with them. Well then in '95, when they wanted to create a similar program that addressed women's under representation in computer science, they brought together a team of people who were interested in educational programs like this. I along with others, took the lead in helping to design and create this program that ultimately came to be GirlTECH.

"Boys seem to be, especially from middle school up, seem to be much more intrigued by the technology for its own sake. They use it much more for games and see the computer much more as a toy and something to use for entertainment than girls do."

So GirlTECH originated in 1995, can you talk a little bit about some of the activities this organization does and also, some of the future goals of the project?   The cornerstone of our program is a two week program that we run in the summer time. We ran the first one in '95, we had a '96 and a '97 program, and actually we're in the middle of planning for our '98 summer program. The other years we've trained 20 teachers in the program. This year, we're expanding to 40. We're going to have two levels of training. We want to have one level of people that are less experienced with computers and we'll really do a lot of basic computer skills with that group. And then we'll have another group that's more experienced with computers and they will move right in to publishing on the Web.        One of the goals of the project is to show teachers the exciting prospects and potential for not only using the Internet, because I think lots of teachers are being trained on how to use the Internet to find resources, but to actually publish their own materials. From my experience of weak technical skills, when we first started talking about GirlTECH, we knew that we wanted to address the representation issue, but we also wanted to create a more technically competent teacher force. So our goals are really two pronged. One is to make teachers aware of the fact that there is a severe under representation of women in computer science that's getting worse instead of better. And then also, to help teachers learn more about the Web and how to use it in their educational practices.

Now let's talk about the computer science problem. I have two essays regarding this, and I think what happens when we bring our teachers together and we talk about this issue, almost all of them will agree that, teachers that use technology see that girls and boys use computers in a different way. Boys seem to be, especially from middle school up, seem to be much more intrigued by the technology for its own sake. They use it much more for games and see the computer much more as a toy and something to use for entertainment than girls do. Part of this, of course, was because of the fact that girls don't particularly like the kind of games that are competitive, shoot 'em up types of games that are the majority of the computer games. So we have to make teachers aware of the fact that girls are not using computers. Now to me, the starkest piece of data, is that, of all of the AP exams given in '97, girls made up only 17 percent of the students who took the AP computer science test. It's the lowest of any AP test given. AP calculus is in the 40s. I have all of these statistics on my Web site. Calculus is up in the 40 percents, chemistry is in the 40s, biology is above 50, and then, compare that to 17 percent of the students who take the computer science tests are females. This is a dramatic example of how girls are not using computers in the same way that boys do.        Now it seems to me that the repercussions of this are really serious, given the way that computers dominate the workplace. What GirlTECH does is, it first of all makes teachers aware of this, and then we say to them 'Okay, what are strategies that we can use to interest girls, to engage girls, in the practice?'

"... it really gave them a lot of self-confidence, and I think they felt a real status that they could help the teachers. "

I've also read about an online computer club that you started at your school that was very active in Internet training, was this an all-girls club ...?   Yes it was.   Okay, so was it started because of GirlTECH? Is that what sparked this interest, or did this grow out of a general interest in having a club like this?   It grew out of an interest in GirlTECH. Then I got a fellowship from the AAUW, the American Association of University Women, to create a project at my school that involved girls. So my proposal was to create a girls' technology club, and it started the last school year, the '96- '97 school year. I trained the girls in the use of the Internet and then used them as lab assistants like, for example, I trained our counselors on the use of the Internet for counseling purposes, [they learned] what resources are available. The girls in my computer club acted as lab assistants to help the counselors to learn to do this. And the same with the teachers, we had an all-day training session on how to use the Internet with all of the teachers from school, and again, the girls acted as lab assistants. What it did for them was that, they were amazed that they knew more than the teachers did about this. So it really gave them a lot of self-confidence, and I think they felt a real status that they could help the teachers.        One of the goals of the project is to show teachers the exciting prospects and potential for not only using the Internet, because I think lots of teachers are being trained on how to use the Internet to find resources, but to actually publish their own materials. From my experience of weak technical skills, when we first started talking about GirlTECH, we knew that we wanted to address the representation issue, but we also wanted to create a more technically competent teacher force. So our goals are really two pronged. One is to make teachers aware of the fact that there is a severe under representation of women in computer science that's getting worse instead of better. And then also, to help teachers learn more about the Web and how to use it in their educational practices.

I've never heard about a club like this, specifically directed to address this issue, that's really interesting.   Yes, a woman by the name of Roberta Ferger, last year wrote a book called "Does Jane Compute" and she was looking for successful programs across the country that she could highlight in her book. She heard about GirlTECH and she came to Houston and visited several of our teachers that have been very active with GirlTECH. She came to Milby High School where I taught and interviewed the girls and observed them working with the computers and then featured them in her book. It was very heartwarming for me to read about her perspective on the girls and what they were doing. This is a huge urban school and she saw some very positive things there. She wrote some very warm stories about these young women that maybe don't have a real soft life, but are working really hard to make themselves want to be doctors and professional women. They really have high goals for themselves and are working hard to achieve them. I still get e-mails from some of the girls who have graduated and several of them tell me how they're doing in school. One girl wrote me early in the year, she's majoring in computer engineering and she was having a lot of trouble on one subject, but her last statement was, "But you know I'm not a quitter." And I thought, well that's what it's all about, just hanging in and having the determination to do it.   Finally, can you talk about any future projects your working on?   Well, we have a long-range goal and vision of somehow seeing GirlTECH as a national program and we certainly don't know that that's going to happen, but we want it to. We've looked for funding before. It would be a very expensive program to run nationally, but we think it's very important, I mean obviously we have a local solution to a national problem.

KeyNotes presents the views of leaders in educational technology. Copyright. © 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997 ALTec, the University of Kansas